Stimulating historical thinking in a collaborative learning task: An analysis of student talk and written answers

Item does not contain fulltextThis study investigates how a collaborative learning task in history, designed to trigger domainspecific thinking, can stimulate high quality student talk and answers and how the task, student talk and student answers are related. We developed a collaborative task that was tested in two cycles. Students worked in pairs on an odd-one-out task with additional questions in which they had to construct a historical context. Our analysis of the student talk of 65 dyads, focusing on the collaborative nature of the talk and the discussion of multiple perspectives, gave insight in how the students constructed a historical context. Our analysis of the written answers, focusing on the use of domain-related concepts and the construction of relationships, made it possible to describe what kind of historical context the students constructed. Chi-square tests gave insight into the relationships between the task, the talk and the written answers. The results show that specific stimuli in the task can lead to different kind of student talk and can help to construct high quality answers. Results also indicate that students have problems with the specialized language of the domain and that the epistemological stance of the students remains problematic, mainly because students do not seem to be aware of the multiple perspectives needed to construct a historical context.01 december 201620 p